


A Bold World for Me

by RachelClark



Series: Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder [2]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - Far Beyond the Stars, Angst, Character(s) of Color, F/F, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Meta, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-27 01:43:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13870431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RachelClark/pseuds/RachelClark
Summary: Hampton, Virginia, 1959. NASA Flight Navigation Engineer Paul Stamets is content with his life. He has an extraordinary job and a beautiful, brilliant niece he loves like a daughter. It is enough… and then, following a chance encounter with a charming car mechanic named Hugh Culber, he finds himself daring to want more.





	A Bold World for Me

**Author's Note:**

> The events of Chapter 1 take place concurrently with those of ‘Fly Me to The Moon’

The mailman catches Sylvia as she’s leaving the house, and her heart skips a beat as she spots the Liberty issue Massachusetts stamp in the corner of the letter he hands her along with a couple of new science fiction pulps, a postcard from Texas, and this month’s issue of _The National Geographic Magazine_.

She opens the letter on the bus, reading and rereading and rereading it all the way to school.

 _Dear Miss Tilly,_ it says, _I am happy to write that you have been accepted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Freshman for the term beginning September 21, 1959. The Committee on Admissions joins me in congratulating you on this recognition of your achievement. The selection of the MIT class of '63 is necessarily limited to a carefully chosen group who, like yourself, have shown character and ability…_

“Your mother will have kittens!” Keyla Detmer tells her gleefully during first-period advanced physics. 

They’re sitting together in the back row, where Dr. Zimmerman put them at the beginning of the school year so that they wouldn’t be a distraction to the young men he was trying to teach. 

“Sylvia Tilly, how could you -” Keyla adds in a dramatic and surprisingly flawless imitation of Sylvia’s mother’s South Carolina accent - “A co-ed college is no place for a respectable young lady! People will think you’re one of those queer girls only interested in workin’, or worse, a common hussy. As if this family hasn’t already endured its fair share of shame… oh, Sylvie, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

Doctor Zimmerman brings his ruler down across the back of Keyla’s hand, splayed on the desk in front of her. Keyla flinches but doesn’t cry out.

“Miss Detmer,” the teacher says sternly, “whilst, regrettably, it’s too late in the academic year to fail you, I’ll happily keep you in detention after school every day until you graduate if you continue to find yourself unable to save your gossip for the hair salon.”

“But Doctor Zee,” Keyla says sweetly, “I wasn’t gossiping, I was congratulating Sylvie on getting accepted into the MIT engineering program.”

Chairs scrape and pencils clatter to the floor, and for the first time in her high school career, every boy in the room is staring at Sylvia Tilly.

Doctor Zimmerman pulls a face that makes him look like he’s just swallowed a rotten egg whole. Keyla sucks the blood from her knuckles with a satisfied pop.

She lands herself in detention again, of course. Sylvia waits for her on the bleachers by the ball field. There’s no reason for her to rush home. Her mother is working the swing shift at the VA hospital tonight, and her uncle rarely gets in before she goes to bed anymore. 

She ignores the team’s practice in favor of her new pulp mags. _Incredible Tales_ has got the last part of the new Captain Kirk serial but seeing as she’s been a bundle of nerves all day she flips past it in search of something lighter. She settles on _The Crack in the Wall_ , the debut of a new writer called AJ Williams. 

Keyla finds her there as the sun is dipping behind the back of the stand, and sits down beside her with a _Vogue_ pattern book.

“Where are you gonna stay?” she asks once they’ve been sitting there together for half an hour or so. “When you go away to college, I mean. I heard MIT doesn’t even have a girl’s dorm.”

“There’s a boarding house for girls in Braintree,” Sylvia replies. 

“Will they let you bring that dog of yours with you?”

“I wouldn’t go without him. I’ll need a car to get to campus though.” 

“Think your uncle will be proud enough to buy you one?” 

“I’d rather get a summer job and buy one myself,” Sylvia replies. “Paul’s already insisted on paying my tuition, and he isn’t exactly made of money.”

“I could put in a word with Harry at the drive-thru?” Keyla suggests. “Him and Stella are looking for extra help over the summer. Only thing is, you’d need wheels to get out to the highway… maybe you could ask your uncle to put up the cash, and you could pay him back in installments over the summer? I bet he’d say yes.”

Sylvia follows Keyla’s gaze down to the field, where a lanky blond boy with Troy Donahue hair is at bat.

“I want to get a car so I can be self-sufficient at college,” she reminds her friend, “not so that you can cream it street racing with Tom Paris."

“You don’t want to see me whip his candy ass?”

“No. My Doctor says I ought to stay away from things that give me the jitters, and that includes your driving.”

“Fine,” Keyla huffs, getting to her feet and brushing the dust off her skirt. “You wanna come over to my place for dinner? You can listen to my dad give me another tiresome ‘why can’t you be more like Sylvia’ lecture.”

Keyla - fluent in French and German on top of being homecoming-queen pretty - is going to be a stewardess when she graduates, flying trans-Atlantic with Pan Am. “My daughter could become a pilot or an engineer if she set her mind to it,” her father had said to Sylvia, right there in front of Keyla, the last time she’d gone over to their house to study, “yet she’d rather dress herself up like a glamor girl and flutter around pouring champagne and lighting cigarettes.”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me I can be whatever I want to be,” Keyla had reminded him impishly. 

Her father had sighed, fondly exasperated. “And I can’t very well retract the sentiment just because what you want isn’t exactly what I would wish for you,” he'd grudgingly agreed. Sylvia only wishes her own mother’s disapproval was as mild as that.

“Not tonight,” Sylvia replies, allowing Keyla to take her hand and pull her to her feet. “I’m gonna head home and fix dinner for Paul. I want to surprise him with my news when he gets in.”

She gets everything ready for eight, just in case Paul is early for a change; it’s only potato salad and coleslaw with cold cuts leftover from Sunday, so it’ll keep.

By ten-thirty she’s dozing on the porch swing, having read the entirety of _Incredible Tales_ and the first two stories in _Galaxy_. The moon is a slender crescent and the stars are bright in the blue-black sky. One by one, the neighbors are turning out their lights.

Her dog, Ripper – a remarkably lazy and excessively affectionate Bernese – climbs up on top of her and curls up with his head on her shoulder.

“Paul’s real late tonight,” Sylvia tells him.

Ripper yawns and wags his tail against her thigh, causing the swing to rock gently.

She misses spending time with Paul. Now that he's a part of the Space Task group he’s hardly ever home. She misses the days when they used to spend all their evenings and weekends together, watching _Wagon Train_ and _The Twilight Zone_ or building robots and radio controlled cars. 

“Comrade Khrushchev sure as hell ain’t letting his boys punch the clock at five,” Sylvia had heard Paul's boss, Mr. Lorca, tell him one Sunday after Church. “Maybe that’s why those red bastards managed to put a goddamn dog into orbit while you’re still struggling to get a tin can up there.”

“Did the Soviets really send a dog into space?” Sylvia had asked her uncle during their walk home that day. “Could we put Ripper up there?”

“Yes,” he’d replied tiredly, “and no.”

“Why not?”

“Because we haven’t been able to create a heat shield strong enough to protect a living creature from burning up during atmospheric re-entry,” he’d explained, “a fact that Mr. Sarukov has been able to demonstrate to Mr. Lorca’s satisfaction without having to sacrifice my family dog to science.”

Ripper lets out a doleful whine as if he knows what she’s thinking about. She reaches out to give him a comforting scratch behind his ear. “You think there’s any Sputniks up there watching us right now?” she asks. “Paul says they ain’t any bigger than a football. Don’t think we could spot one from here. Maybe if we head up to the mountains this summer, though? We could take a telescope…”

The dog doesn’t respond, but that’s okay. Ripper has been listening to Sylvia talk since she was six, never telling her to shut up or that little girls should be seen and not heard.

“Did you know Sputnik means ‘fellow traveler’ in Russian?” she carries on. “You’d think a Warmonger like Mr. Khrushchev might have picked something a little more intimidating. Ours are called ‘Explorer’ and ‘Vanguard’ and ‘Discoverer....’”

Uncle Paul had wanted to call one ‘Star Traveller’, but his superiors had told him it wasn’t aspirational enough.

“That’s your problem, Paul,” Sylvia’s mother had told her brother when he’d shared their verdict with his family over dinner. “You live your whole life like some bigger boy stuck a ‘Kick Me’ sign on your back when you were in high school and you never bothered to take the damn thing off. You need to assert yourself more.” 

“He asserted himself against dad,” Sylvia had reminded her mother - even though she knew the words would hurt – because she’d be damned if she ever let anyone badmouth Paul that way in front of her and her mother was no exception. She’d expected to be sent to her room, but instead, her mother had gone all tight-lipped, had risen stiffly to her feet and taken herself out to the porch, where she’d remained for the rest of the evening.

Sylvia only has a few, vague memories of her father. He worked in a bank. He was big and strong, and had a beard and smoked a pipe. Sometimes when she wanted him to listen to her he’d get all mad and tell her to quit yammering. Her mother had taught her that she was to stay in her room and be quiet whenever he got angry. Sometimes he stayed angry for hours.

By contrast, her memories of the night Paul came to get them are vivid. Her parents had been fighting for a long time. There had been banging as well as loud voices. She’d lain awake in bed listening to it all. A car had pulled into the drive and everything had gone quiet. A few minutes later, her bedroom door had opened. It was after midnight and she was supposed to sleeping, so she’d closed her eyes tightly and tried to keep her breathing steady. Her Uncle had picked her up, blankets and all, and carried her out to the car. Her mother was already sitting in the passenger seat. Her father had stood silently on the porch, watching them drive away.

They don’t talk about it, but the rest of the town does.

“Honestly, that man is a saint,” Sylvia had once heard the Reverend’s wife tell some of the other ladies at church, “taking in his sister after that husband of hers did her wrong, and caring for that little girl as if she were his own.”

“Such a shame,” Mrs. Grimes, Sylvia’s old elementary school teacher, had chimed in. “He’s a handsome man, but I can’t imagine any woman wanting to marry a fella who lets his sister run him the way she does, and that child of hers is just plain queer. All brains and no social graces.”

“Are we the reason you aren't married?” Sylvia had asked her uncle once when she’d still been quite young.

“I’ve never wanted to get married,” had been his reply. “There’s nothing a man ought to want that I don’t have right here.”

Sylvia had learned about 'ought' in grammar at school. _“We use ‘ought’ to express the view that something is the right thing to do because it’s morally correct, polite, or someone’s duty.”_ She wonders, sometimes, if maybe Paul wants something he didn't ought to, that isn’t right or morally correct. Surely most folks do, every now and then? And what about when you can’t really tell? When you just have to decide as best you can?

Eventually, she falls asleep. She dreams she’s watching a baseball game. Captain Kirk is pitching and a madman in a bowtie is at bat, and they get into a fight about whether Kirk ought to have saved Edith Keeler after all and Paul (who is the umpire) tries to mediate. Keyla sits next to Sylvia in the stands, looking bored and eating fish fingers and custard.

Paul wakes her by kneeling down beside her to tenderly brush an errant curl back from her face and whispering, “Hey there, college girl.”

“How did you know?” she asks sleepily, gently pushing Ripper off of her lap so can she sit up straight. Ripper throws himself at Paul instead, resting his forepaws on her uncle’s shoulders and licking his cheek in a doggy embrace.

“I’ve known since you were seven,” he tells her, settling cross-legged on the floor with the dog draped across his lap “Since the first time you and I built a bottle rocket in the backyard. You were so determined to do all of the work yourself. I remember you using my old bike pump to fill it up with air. I didn’t think you’d have the strength, but you did.”

“I couldn’t believe how high it went,” Sylvia remembers, “and then it came down right next to mom in the driveway, while she was talking to Mrs. Grimes over the fence... she screamed so loud half the street came to see what was going on, and she was so mad at you!”

Paul laughs, and suddenly the butterflies Sylvia has had since she opened the letter this morning are gone. 

“You dropped this,” he tells her, handing her the magazine that must have slipped from her hand while she was sleeping, her admissions letter tucked between its pages. “Did Captain Kirk save the world and get the girl?”

“The girl died in this one,” she tells him, “but he did save the world, and anyway, I don’t reckon Captain Kirk’s the type for settling down with a girl. He seems more like you.”

“Like me?” Paul seems rather startled by the suggestion.

“You know, married to his work,” she explains. 

Her uncle sighs, and smiles, faintly. “Right,” he says. “So, how are we going to celebrate? _Forbidden Planet_ ’s playing at Wilder’s in Norfolk this weekend…”

“I was thinking…” Sylvia says hesitantly. “Maybe we could go look at cars?”

“Cars?” he repeats, baffled.

“I… I want to get one,” she explains, “for when I go away in the fall, and I thought… I thought if you could loan me the money to buy one before the summer, then I could get a job, pay you back and even save a little to go towards my room and board.”

She expects him to have misgivings, but Paul just smiles and nods decisively, looking down at the dog and muttering something about the planets being aligned.

“Is that a yes?” Sylvia asks.

“Michael has a friend who works at a garage,” he replies. “Seems like an honest man. I’ll see if she thinks he’d give us a good deal... and then maybe we can go talk to him.” 

She’s off the porch swing in an instant, squishing the dog between their bodies as she wraps her arms around his neck in a tight hug.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is AU, but Stamets being Tilly's fond-yet-grumpy uncle is canon right? And Keyla Detmer hasn't had much canon character development but can we agree, based on Emily Coutts facial expressions, that she's actually sassy af?
> 
> So, just over a month ago, I posted what I thought was a one-shot called 'Fly Me to the Moon'.
> 
> I was overwhelmed by the warmest and most encouraging comments I've ever received for anything I've written, and I was really happy because I've loved building this funny little world and it's very rewarding to find that people connect with it! I am going to go back and reply to those comments this week... honestly I think some of them were better written than the actual fic, and I felt very humbled by them.
> 
> I have started to write two short sequels; this one, which focuses on Paul and Hugh, and a yet-to-be-titled story about Michael and Phillipa. I think both will end up being around 10,000 words and 4/5 chapters long. My writing process is quite slow, although it has become a bit more efficient in the year since I joined AO3. I expect to update roughly once every two to three weeks.
> 
> The title of this story is a line from Nina Simone's 'Feeling Good' (I made myself a boss mixtape for writing it!)


End file.
